February 1st, 2023

Against Bookism

At the end of the year, folks were tallying up their book lists, doing best-of-the-year lists but also just of-the-year counts, how many total, by genre, by gender, compared to last year, everything. Stats are interesting, I suppose–I like data too–but it made me nervous. Because why do people count books? I feel like we tally things we should do, or want to want to do, like workouts and days without a safety incident, and not things we just gravitate towards joyfully, like tv shows and cheese. In all the 2022 tallies I saw on socials in December, no one said, “I had 38 cupcakes this year, gonna try to top that in ’23!” So, books, eh–in the same category as cardio and keeping the guard on the bandsaw. I mean, that’s good–but not as good as a cupcake. As a writer and a reader and a producer of books, I sometimes DO feel like a book is delicious. Some books are carrots but some are cupcakes. Aren’t they?

The other things is that as soon as you start measuring you invite comparison. If we’re all counting–and even though I feel like I shouldn’t, I also count books–then there’s a right number we’re trying to get to. Read a little faster, skip a little tv, focus a little better, and crank up that number? Eh, not really–like most things in my life, I seem to have a set point with reading. I have read slightly more than a book a week–about 60 books a year–almost every year since I started counting.

That was almost 17 years ago. The summer between first and second year of my grad school program, I was waiting to meet my thesis supervisor and I wanted to have something to tell him when he finally turned up, so I started keeping a journal of the books I read. Notably, I did not change the books I read to find more impressive ones to enter in the journal–the first one was Necklace of Kisses by Francesca Lia Block, the 6th book in the Weetzie Bat series, which was for teenagers. I didn’t even find an impressive journal–it had a flower on it. My supervisor wound up not caring about it at all but I found it quite useful over the years to take a few sentences of notes on each book I read, just to record my general impression of it, in case I forgot what I had read later or was asked for recommendation.

So I kept it up, through the second year of grad school and on into my next job, the first book I actually wrote, the coming of GoodReads–a similar concept, but too public to write what I actually think of certain books–and on and on. A few more than 60 books some years, a few under others–way under that the first year of the pando, but I am back at capacity now, baby! I like reading, like books, like thinking about them and…if I’m being really honest, I like counting them. BUT WHY?? I don’t think about books as medicinal, I swear I don’t, but I just like to tote them up. They aren’t vegetables, mainly–cupcakes, mainly cupcakes! But I want to count them.

I finished my 1000th book on Saturday. The Sleep of Apples by Ami Sands Brodoff. I enjoyed the book, a collections of linked stories, but I also got that frisson when I finished it of knowing I had hit 1000. Three diaries, almost 17 years, and 1000 books. I judge myself so harshly for this but also–just so excited for 1001. What is this impulse?